Julia
Sorry for not responding earlier.
First of all, having a view on a raster catalog enables to join attributes to the raster catalog to keep the data model in a strictly relational manner. The view allows to represent data in a denormalized way.
The second reason is a little bit more complex: We store meteo data in our raster catalog. The meteo data is normally identified by a parameter (such as temperature) and a timestamp. Within the database, every raster gets its own raster_data_id. Many times, due to rapid update intervals, we get several rasters for the same parameter
and the same timestamp. The rasters get individual raster_data_ids but have the same parameters and timestamps. However, the users only want to have access to the most recent raster data of a given parameter and timestamp.
Having a view on the raster catalog allows to implement the view such that only the most recent version of a raster is visible to the user. Deleting rasters is not an option since also intermediate rasters are used for verification.
Do you have an idea for an alternative solution?
Martin